Attitudes toward innovation
August 31, 2017
The triumph of progress In the last century or so the notion of progress through economic development has proved so popular that governments positively encourage it. The mindset has moved from suspicion to imperative. Innovation has become a buzz word: sometimes it’s “innovation for its own sake” and sometimes it’s “innovation as rhetoric” and these …
Nottingham named third most entrepreneurial city in the UK
August 15, 2017
Nottingham has been ranked third in a list of the UK’s most entrepreneurial cities according to a new study from global office broking service Instant Offices. Analysis of vast amounts of Companies House data and comparisons of population estimates with business growth helped determine an ‘Entrepreneurial Index’. While Brighton and Manchester held the first two …
Enterprise education must reflect the before, during and after of entrepreneurship
May 23, 2017
The provision of finance to small, entrepreneurial firms is a vital element of any dynamic economy. Such businesses constitute one of the traditional links between radical innovation and economic development, yet they are also unusually susceptible to market failure. Many years ago, when much of my teaching was in the area of finance, I faced …
Lessons about leadership
November 1, 2016
You might expect business schools to know all there is to know about leadership. As the former dean of just such an institution, I would warn against delusions of omniscience. One of the best ways to progress is to make mistakes and learn from them, and in this regard, business schools are no different from …
How do crisis and opportunity work in unison?
April 7, 2016
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change,” wrote Milton Friedman, economist and Nobel Prize winner, in his highly influential Capitalism and Freedom, first published more than 50 years ago. Was he right? Not really. Granted, crisis does produce change, if only because crises tend to be situations in which staying the …
Spot the ‘genius’
November 10, 2015
Imagine you’re on a spaceship travelling towards some distant star. One day you glance in the equivalent of your rear-view mirror and see a faster vessel about to overtake you. It turns out that this vessel is from your own planet. It left Earth years after your mission but has caught up as a result …
Common innovation and the harmonious society
September 3, 2015
The Confucian idea of the harmonious society is one of the great principles of economic thought. It is hardly necessary for a British economist to point out as much to the readers of China Daily. Yet whether the concept is consistent with innovation, that essential engine of growth, is an increasingly significant question for any …
